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Keynote Speaker — The Future “Normal” using Big Data and Artificial Intelligence

Dr. Michael Bamberger

Senior Fellow at the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation

Michael Bamberger has a Ph.D. in Sociology from the London School of Economics.


He has been involved for over forty years in the evaluation of development programs in Africa, Asia and Latin America and has taught and/or worked on program evaluations in more than 45 countries.


He lived in Latin America for 13 years working with NGOs on urban community development and microcredit; and then worked for 23 years with the World Bank (research center of the Urban and Regional Development Office, coordinating evaluation training programs in Asia and Africa, and as Senior Sociologist in the Gender and Development Office).

Since his retirement from the World Bank in 2001, he has consulted on evaluation-related issues with 10 UN agencies, the World Bank and regional development banks, foundations, bilateral development agencies and NGOs.


His focus has been on poverty, social exclusion, gender equality, housing and urban development, and the identification of unintended outcomes.


Over the past few years he has worked on the opportunities and challenges for integrating new information technology into the evaluation of development programs.


He co-directed workshops and webinars on this theme for the World Bank, the American Evaluation Association, EVAL-SDGs, and the Latin American Evaluation Network

His recent publications include: Dealing with complexity in development evaluation;  RealWorld Evaluation: working under budget, time, data and political constraints; Integrating Big Data into the Evaluation of Development Programs; and Evaluating the social development goals through equity-focused and gender-responsive evaluations.


In recent years he has been a member of the Expert Advisory Panel of the Independent Evaluation Office of UNDP; an evaluation advisor to UN Women and to DFID’s evaluation quality control advisory panel (EQUALS);  a Member of MERL Tech’s (Information Technology and Monitoring, Evaluation, Research, and Learning) Conference Planning Committee; and a Senior Fellow at the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie).

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